Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 267 posts

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#101

Post by ghaff »

flgr wrote: post #87
lotsofpulp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, the world doesn't present us with a solution that is "fair", especially when demand is greater than supply. Assuming you were tasked with reducing the congestion of the road network in NYC and its surrounding areas, do you any ideas of a solution that is "fair"? Edit: Elsewhere in this thread, someone posted a link to Beijing's solution to congestion, which seem interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki…

I think that's not any more fair than a direct charge. Or am I missing something? From what I've heard well off families in Beijing will then just have multiple cars, one with an odd license plate and one with an even one.

I can't speak specifically to the Beijing system but rationing (or lotteries) as a general approach are often seen as a fairer way to distribute a limited good than letting whoever has the most money have it.

That said, especially given the circumstances of Manhattan, congestion charging probably makes the most sense and also has the virtue of bringing in additional money that can theoretically be used to improve public transit.

[ADDED: I think the key here is that driving in Manhattan for individuals is something of a luxury good. We'd view things differently if this was about distributing relief food after a natural disaster.]

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#102

Post by [deleted] »

tantalor wrote: post #92
lazerpants wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. I think if you took the exact same logic and applied it to say, schools, supporters would feel completely differently about it. Example: It's really hard to get your child into certain public schools in NYC. Why not start charging $3k a year per child (much less than private schools) at high demand s…

You have a false analogy. Traffic increases as the size of the road network increases, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand This is not the case for schools.

[deleted]

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#103

Post by rthomas6 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #81
rthomas6 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can defend it by having good enough public transportation to not need a car in Manhattan. Unless you're carrying something large/heavy, there's no reason to go to Manhattan via car. It's something we Americans aren't used to and don't think about, but basing cities around cars instead of people is a bad idea. In NYC, it's often faster to take the subway instead of drive.

Was Manhattan "based around cars"? I don't know the specifics but I thought NYC mostly just grew from its roots from a time quite a while before cars. I imagine a city truly based around cars could be made to have much less congestion while still accommodating walkers/bicyclists. More lanes between buildings, with sidewalks replaced by pedestrian bridges so traffic flows with less obstruction, for example. Less inter…

No, Manhattan was not based around cars, and that's a good thing. It's what allows for such high population density, and so many unique neighborhoods. Allowing so many people to live comfortably and efficiently in its limited space is what give Manhattan many of its most sought-after features: The food, the diversity, the infrastructure, the walkability. We shouldn't design for cars and accommodate for pedestrians, we should design for pedestrians and accommodate for cars.

There are many cities based around cars exactly as you describe. They're okay, and there are great places in them that you can drive. But it sort of necessitates driving. In these cities, it's harder to just walk out of your apartment and get groceries, or eat at a restaurant, or watch a movie, or go to a pub, because things are much farther away, because of the scale of roads and parking needed for fast car transportation. And that, in turn, decreases population density, increases isolation, and destroys any sense of a neighborhood. It make far, far, far more sense to make places easy to walk to first, and worry about cars second.

I don't think you realize what NYC would be giving up if it were designed the way you suggest. Less intersections and faster traffic + all the parking needed would mean less people, less shops, and most of all less culture. Those roads have to go somewhere. It doesn't matter how many pedestrian bridges you build, designing things around cars means that you need to design everything at the scale of cars. Imagining Manhattan designed around cars and every attraction having individual parking so people can drive there is a nightmare scenario. Times Square: Gone. Street food on every corner: Gone. Small niche shops and restaurants: gone. Because people couldn't walk there easily anymore.

Look at these two satellite images [0]. One is downtown Florence, Italy. The other is an interstate interchange in Atlanta. These two images are at the same scale. Which makes more sense? Which would you rather live in? How much does it matter that driving is hard in the first picture?

[0]: https://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2014/06/sprawl.jp...

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#104

Post by Eridrus »

maxsilver wrote: post #79
lazerpants wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. I think if you took the exact same logic and applied it to say, schools, supporters would feel completely differently about it. Example: It's really hard to get your child into certain public schools in NYC. Why not start charging $3k a year per child (much less than private schools) at high demand s…

> Why is congestion pricing okay when applying the same philosophy to other matters of public good isn't? I think the real root of the problem is that congestion pricing is never okay in matters of public good, we've just conditioned ourselves to believe that infrastructure is this special case of impossible problem to solve, so our terrible workaround to this artificial problem sometimes seems begrudgingly reasonabl…

Manhattan is fundamentally limited by space, not sure how you expect to solve this problem when there is going to be more demand for this good than we can actually supply. This problem is only going to get worse as we get self-driving cars.

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#105

Post by saas_co_de »

turc1656 wrote: post #68
saas_co_de wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that charging both fees and taxes means that the poor are excluded, because they can't afford the fees, but they still have to pay part of the taxes.

All public goods are taxed even if they don't have associated fees. So, if we were to move everything to a fee-for-usage system, I don't think you'd like the result since the wealthy pay an extraordinarily outsized portion of funding for public goods and services (which they use far less than the average person). The poor would still be excluded because the new fee would be at least the existing tax+fee, plus some ad…

> The poor person is still priced out in your scenario.

correct, but they haven't been taxed for something they can't afford to use anyway, so they are better off.

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#106

Post by intrasight »

intrasight wrote: post #43
saas_co_de wrote: post #2

It seems like it would be fairer to privatize the roads entirely and force the people who can actually use them to pay the entire cost. Otherwise poor people are subsidizing roads reserved for the rich that they can't even use.

>Otherwise poor people are subsidizing roads reserved for the rich that they can't even use. Welcome to the state of infrastructure everywhere, but especially in big cities like NYC.

Not so much poor people (who don't pay much if anything in taxes) but middle-class people.

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#107

Post by gamblor956 »

lazerpants wrote: post #58
nwah1 wrote: post #7

Congestion pricing is one of the most economically literate ways to improve traffic, and those funds can be used to improve infrastructure. It isn't so different from surge pricing in ridesharing apps. There is a narrowmindedness on the part of opponents of both congestion pricing and surge pricing, because they are ignoring the obvious point that if they weren't paying the fees they'd be paying in terms of time. Not…

I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. I think if you took the exact same logic and applied it to say, schools, supporters would feel completely differently about it. Example: It's really hard to get your child into certain public schools in NYC. Why not start charging $3k a year per child (much less than private schools) at high demand s…

In the U.S., a public education is considered a right. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and so the same considerations don't apply.

For example, we already charge drivers for the privilege of driving: annual license fees, mandated insurance, gasoline taxes, etc. Congestion fees/taxes are simply an extension of the costs associated with the driving privilege.

With respect to schools, we already have a de facto congestion charge, in the form of housing prices near desirable schools. In many states, property taxes near desirable schools are also higher to reflect the greater desirability of the neighborhood.

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#108

Post by chimeracoder »

baldfat wrote: post #94
rthomas6 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't you take a train instead? That area is one of the only places in the US where public transportation is good enough to make that feasible.

Time for me to get on the train and go to NYC one way is 2 hours plus, so over 4 hours round trip. It is 50 miles away from my old home. Cost is $27 round trip (off peak) or $38.50 (peak) for the ticket. So taking the train is convenient and I love it but it ruins the rest of my day. Now there was a time when I was 19 and the last train left at 11 PM I the schedule said 1 AM kind of sucked and the next train was at 5…

> Time for me to get on the train and go to NYC one way is 2 hours plus, so over 4 hours round trip. It is 50 miles away from my old home. Cost is $27 round trip (off peak) or $38.50 (peak) for the ticket. So taking the train is convenient and I love it but it ruins the rest of my day.

Put another way, with congestion pricing, you have two options:

* Pay $27-$38.50 (total) for a four hour round-trip on public transit

* Pay $26 (not including gas) for a faster trip in a private car, probably about two hours round-trip[0]

I'm having a hard time sympathizing with this as a problem, especially since you're coming from 50 miles away. I know people who commute every day from Kingston to Brooklyn using public transit, and that's a full 100 miles.

[0] With no traffic, Kingston to Manhattan (100 miles) is about two hours by car each way, so I'll assume that your travel would take two hours for a round trip.

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#109

Post by lazerpants »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62
bunderbunder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How practical is that for the people who are currently driving in NYC? In Chicago, the vast majority of people who live in the suburbs and work in the loop take Metra. But Chicago's transit system is so heavily hub-and-spoke that the public transit just isn't practical if you don't work near the hub, and plenty of people don't. For them, it's frequently a choice between an hour or so in traffic, and more like 2 hours…

> I can't really blame anyone for deciding that 4 hours total commuting is not an option I know people who drive from their faraway place to a train station outside the city and then take the Metro-North into Grand Central Station. From street parking to bridges and tunnels, New York City massively subsidises drivers. I'd strongly prefer we raise tolls and congestion charges and use the proceeds to modernize our subw…

>New York City massively subsidises drivers.

Actually, the bridge and tunnel tolls are major revenue generators for the MTA. The subway is near revenue neutral. The buses lose tons of money.

Re: Driving a Car in Manhattan Could Cost $11 Under Congestion Plan

#110

Post by jdietrich »

lazerpants wrote: post #58
nwah1 wrote: post #7

Congestion pricing is one of the most economically literate ways to improve traffic, and those funds can be used to improve infrastructure. It isn't so different from surge pricing in ridesharing apps. There is a narrowmindedness on the part of opponents of both congestion pricing and surge pricing, because they are ignoring the obvious point that if they weren't paying the fees they'd be paying in terms of time. Not…

I'm always surprised by the only-in-this-circumstance libertarian philosophy of people who support congestion pricing. I think if you took the exact same logic and applied it to say, schools, supporters would feel completely differently about it. Example: It's really hard to get your child into certain public schools in NYC. Why not start charging $3k a year per child (much less than private schools) at high demand s…

I think it's a matter of framing. You can parse congestion charges as either a tax on pollution and congestion, or a marketized way of redistributing a scarce resource more efficiently. It logically and intuitively fits within a broad range of ideological schema; it's both a collectivist means of pricing externalities and an individualist means of allocating resources.

The same can't be said of charging for in-demand school places - from a collectivist perspective, such a policy would be read as punishing poorer families for aspiration and disincentivizing social mobility. It's plausible that essentially the same policy could be reframed by redistributing funding from higher-performing to lower-performing schools and allowing or requiring affluent parents to make up the deficit.

Post reply on HN